Becoming Somebody

That about says it all. I’m hoping to finish my next, still-at-this-time-untitled story.

Just a couple words on last night’s Democratic debate before I take off, however. It was nice to see that smug, obnoxious Hillary Clinton smile smacked around a bit. Kudos to John Edwards and Tim Russert for laying the most consistent smackdown.

And to my fellow Barack Obama supporters, don’t read too much into the idea that he didn’t hit Hillary hard enough, even after saying he would come out swinging. It’s just not his style, and that is what I like about him. The dude is a smooth cat, will always be a smooth cat, and is the best presidential option because he is a smooth cat. Let the others knock Hillary from her broomstick.

All right. Back to the story.

It isn’t bad enough for Dick Cheney to get his miserable, sadistic kicks from slaughtering animals in facilities that amount to little more than lavish, well-manicured death camps. His Rottenness also needs to offend millions in the process.

On Monday, Cheney visited The Clove Valley Rod and Gun Club in LaGrangeville, N.Y., a 4,000-acre spread of land in upstate New York that charges its seventy members as much as $100,000 a year for the right to gun down ducks and pheasants. No, Cheney didn’t shoot anyone in the face. Nor did he consume human flesh or burn babies in sacrifice to the Dark Lords, which the veep has been rumored to do in his spare time. What could be so offensive then? Just a little murder among friends.

Well, you see, The Clove Valley Rod and Gun Club proudly hangs a Confederate flag on its grounds. For those of you who may be unaware of things like history, the Confederate flag, after the Confederate States lost the Civil War, became the banner of choice for racist rednecks who like to remember the good ol’ days when lynchings were the toast of the town. These racist rednecks, Double-Rs as I will refer to them from this point on, clamor that the flag is actually a symbol of states’ rights and Southern pride. Double-Rs are also stupid. They ain’t too keen on book learning.

While I fully support a Double-R’s legal right to display the Confederate flag, or the Nazi flag, or the American flag, or any other stupid pennant he or she chooses, I have a problem with the second highest ranking elected official in my country supporting a business that clearly sees no problem celebrating such a divisive, hate-filled symbol. I’ll ignore the fact that he’s also supporting an industry that I believe to be ethically bankrupt. It would be a little unfair for me to expect more of him, given his track record.

As usual, Cheney has chosen to deny the obvious. A spokesperson for His Rottenness claimed the veep did not see any Confederate flags and that no one in his office was aware of any on the premises. Unfortunately, people have these little things called cameras that capture images and then reproduce them digitally or in print. One of these devices snapped a shot of the flag in question. Once again, science foils Cheney’s plans. If only he had another four years to get rid of that little annoyance, too. Civil rights were pushed aside with hardly a whisper. Imagine how easy it would be to ban cameras from executive locales.

Of course, no one from Cheney’s office has spoken negatively about Clove Valley yet, even in the face evidence proving that which they refuse to accept. I know it must be hard for Cheney to believe, but just because you ignore something doesn’t mean it fails to exist.

I wish he had just shot another one of his cronies in the face with buckshot. At least then I could laugh at the outcome of one of these hunting expeditions. This time, though, all he did was revolt 95 percent of the nation and kill a few birds. How dull.

Maybe we should all move to Greenland.

According to an article in The New York Times (click here to read the full story), the changing climate in Greenland — which has led to warmer temperatures, shorter winters, and thawed glacial ice — is allowing local farmers to produce vegetables and other crops for the first time in 500 years. I don’t know how I feel about this.

I couldn’t be bothered making a video review this week. The technology wasn’t cooperating, and I got sick of trying to get it to work. It takes a lot to sit in an empty room and talk to your computer screen. Not as fun as it sounds. That being said, I still wanted to spend a few words on last week’s story, “Making Sense of Redheads and Happiness.”

I was plagued with a serious case of writer’s block last week. As anyone who has gone through this will tell you, the biggest pain in the ass about writer’s block is that you write the entire time. Everything you write either sucks or lacks inspiration, though. There is a gap between what your brain creates and what your brain wants to create. Nothing in the first category seems to satisfy the latter. The end result was three and a half wasted days. I spent all day Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at the keyboard or in front of a notebook, but nothing came of it. On Thursday afternoon, though, I told myself I had to get something done for Friday. That was the point of this project — to write on days or weeks when I didn’t want to write. So I sat down and decided to attempt a story dealing with happiness. After all, I’ve been asked for two weeks why I only seem to be interested in the downside of life.

The answer is this:

I think a well-balanced person isn’t someone who is happy all the time. It’s someone who is able to accept his or her happiness along with ever other emotion felt by a human being, even the emotions that make him or her feel bad. On the flip side, a well-balanced person shouldn’t dwell on the negative and ignore the positive. It’s called well-balanced for a reason. The problem, I think, is that people collectively associate being happy with being normal. It is somehow antisocial to be sad or angry, so, in an attempt to seem normal and fit in with everyone else, we repress our negative emotions and deny this key portion of ourselves. This leads to some interesting things in people, and it fascinates me.

The more I thought about this phenomenon from the perspective of a happy story, the more I understood what happiness meant to me. I think happiness is a really simple emotion, a tiny blip in the vast landscape of human feeling. It doesn’t take much to produce happiness, compared to the overwhelmingly desperate, often-complicated circumstances needed to produce emotions like grief, regret, or despair. That shouldn’t devalue happiness. If anything, it speaks to the resilience of the human condition.

I wanted to convey the simplicity of happiness with a story that was equally simple. I didn’t want to clutter it up with too many layers that tried to convey some symbolic meaning. For me, there is no deeper meaning to happy. It’s a surface emotion. I don’t think there are lessons to be learned from it. That may seem bleak to some, but I think it makes those happy moments even more valuable. They’re the prize we get for hauling around all our personal baggage.

For Kevin, happiness is the validation he feels from meeting this girl. It makes him see the totality of her, not just that her hair color isn’t perfect or that she’s a little chunkier than the modelesque women he often pines over. He’s happy. She made him feel that way.

My hope for Kevin is that he begins to understand this after meeting Rory. I hope he says to himself, “Wow. That felt kind of nice. Maybe this happy thing isn’t so bad after all.” It won’t change him on a fundamental level, but it should allow him to look at things from every angle and maybe let go of himself a little.

I’m not sure how much of that came through in the actual story, and I wish I had offered a little more insight into Kevin’s character, even though I think he’s decently developed. Maybe my attempt at simplicity added an unnecessary complication to the story, making it harder to read and interpret. I tried to express a theme by intentionally excluding it. I’m interested to know if anyone picked up on this. If not, the story deserves a lesser grade than I gave it.

Tomorrow, on yet another Fiction Friday, you will read the fruits of my labor this week. I would like to apologize in advance for the story I will present. I am still working on it now and have been unable to come up with an idea I like. What you will read is the product of a high-stress, low-creativity week that came on the heels of a remarkably productive one. Again, I’m sorry. You, my loyal reader, deserve better.

The story I will post tomorrow is, at this time, untitled. The only thing I can think to call it is “Becoming John Cusack.” Better yet, I may just title it, “Wishing It Was Still Thursday.” See, I wasn’t lying. I really have nothing. It was a rough week.

I think I was mentally fried after writing “The Clothes We Wore Then” and then jumping right into the 48 Hour Film Project. Maybe there are only so many decent ideas one man can produce in a seven-day span.

I spent all of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday either at the computer or at my notebook working on possible ideas. I’d write a sentence or a paragraph, in some cases a few pages, but nothing seemed good enough to stick. So today I just raced through this lame story in direct response to everyone who bugged me because I don’t write about happy things. This story, because it sucks, will help explain why. I think you’ll see I write much better when I focus on the other side of life.

I hope all of you who had been hoping for a happy story will now go elsewhere for your positive cheer and let me get back to doing what I do best: depressing the masses.

If you can’t tell, I am annoyed. I am questioning my creativity and my talent. And it’s only Week 3. This is not good.

For all those wondering what things would be like if Dick Cheney were the President of the United States, there is still hope your morbid curiosity will be satisfied before too long. If things hold true on the Republican side of the nomination races, and Rudy Giuliani is his party’s presidential candidate, then there is a 50/50 shot The Great Satan will rise to this nation’s highest office.

If that happens, I’m out. That’s my breaking point. Canada, here I come. And I’m bringing the dog with me. If Nicole wants to stay, that’s too bad, because I’ll have had just about enough. Sorry, Mom and Dad, but that’s the way it goes. Have fun starting World War III. I’ll hope the the nuke goes off close to the house so the blast gets you quick. Radiation fallout is a bitch, from what I understand.

You can thank The New York Times for this morning’s melodrama. I know. I should take the lead of so many others and not pay attention to the news, and if I can’t help myself, just do so long enough to read about the glamorous stuff, like forest fires in wealthy neighborhoods or gang violence in the poor ones.

The article in question is on the front page, but below the fold. It is hardly prominently displayed. The title: “Mideast Hawks Help to Develop Giuliani Policy.” That sounds refreshing, doesn’t it? Here are some excerpts:

1. Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

2. “Elections are necessary but not sufficient to establish genuine democracy,” Mr. Giuliani wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs, the policy journal. “Aspiring dictators sometimes win elections, and elected leaders sometimes govern badly and threaten their neighbors.” (Note to Rudy: That might be the most ironic statement ever made.)

3. Mr. Giuliani calls for continuing the war in Iraq and building up the military by adding at least 10 combat brigades to the Army. He takes a dim view of the United Nations, which he sees as good for little other than humanitarian and peacekeeping missions, but wants to expand NATO and invite Israel to join it.

He would continue the Bush administration’s efforts to fight AIDS and malaria in Africa, but would tailor policy toward Africa to emphasize trade over aid. (Note to readers: Trade, in the geopolitical/geoeconomic context, is not as friendly and equitable as it sounds.)

4. In a recent speech to the Jewish Coalition, he went further, accusing the Democrats of putting too much stock in diplomacy. “This is the great fallacy in this now very strong Democratic desire to negotiate, negotiate, negotiate and negotiate,” he said. “You’ve got to know with whom to negotiate and with whom you should not negotiate.”

5. When Mr. Giuliani was asked in a recent interview if he could be viewed as an evenhanded broker when it came to Israeli-Palestinian issues, he questioned the premise of the question.

“America shouldn’t be evenhanded in dealing with the difference between an elected democracy that’s a government ruled by law, and a group of terrorists,” he said. “I think that was part of the mistake of the 1990s that led to the debacle that we saw in the Middle East in the way Clinton was handling it.”

To read the entire article, click here.

Doesn’t that make you feel all fuzzy inside? Certainly there’s no great danger in this kind of foreign policy. Other sovereign nations, filled with free-thinking people, many of whom are not terrorists, love to be dictated to by a moral authority incapable of and unwilling to understand their positions on topics that directly impact their lives. The world loves that the most dangerous country on Earth disdains the United Nations, patronizes diplomacy, and will only negotiate with parties willing to agree to terms BEFORE negotiating. Thank you, Rudy, for surrounding yourself with such inspired, forward-thinking people.

Perhaps I should have titled my story of two weeks ago “I Wish Rudy Giuliani Would Up and Die Already,” because this is the kind of misguided, dangerous rhetoric that I was railing against. It leads to nothing but dead kids in flag-draped boxes and many more piled up some place far away from here that no one cares about long enough to humanize. It makes me fucking sick. And I really do wish that these neoconservatives would just die out or quit being born so the rest of us can try to live in some kind of peace.

Guys like Giuliani want to rule the world like it’s a high school gym class. The tough-guy, meatstick, soon-to-be-frat-boy morons are in charge, and they keep everyone in line with the threat of an ass kicking. And if someone is brazen enough to, I don’t know, not buy into the testosterone-fueled bullshit, read a book or develop some kind of larger worldview, then they get picked on so the rest of the class thinks to themselves, “You’re right. That guy is a pussy.”

The world is not some kind of homoerotic high school fantasy where the tough guys rule the halls with an iron fist. If I am once again forced to live in such an environment because slightly more than half of this country’s goobers vote for a guy like Rudy, then I am taking my shit and transferring to a different school. Because this one is starting to suck. The students are getting dumber. No one is learning anything new. Something has got to give.

And just remember, boys. That ban on assassination can go more than one way. You’re not the only tough guys on the block. Be careful what you wish for.

And with that, I will now go and prepare to explain to the FBI and the CIA that I am not in any way endorsing or planning to assassinate anyone. And should I disappear from my home in the middle of the night, I’ve probably been shipped to Syria to have my balls strapped to electrodes. You got to love rendition.

… rethink this entire Becoming Somebody thing.

Being a nobody was pretty good now that I think about it.

I need to get out of this home-office. Too many distractions. Too much bad writing going on. Nothing I write seems to stick. I am doomed, stuck in just my third week. Failure! Fear! No way out! Brain dead! Brain Jail! Trapped by own confusion! The Fear! The Fear! The Fear!

But just then Bruce Springsteen circa 1975 singing a slowed-down version of Thunder Road accompanied by nothing but a piano plays on my iTunes. Thank you, iTunes. Thank you.

I’m not saying I don’t feel sympathetic toward the people whose homes are burning. I certainly have a tremendous amount of respect for the firefighters working around the clock to extinguish the flames. I even feel for the countless wildlife, both flora and fauna, that has been lost since these fires started. And the environmental impact of this event should not be forgotten.

But enough is enough. On the scale of national tragedies, this falls somewhere between dandruff and teenagers having unprotected sex. The only reason this is getting so much press is because the houses being lost belong to rich people. And I don’t care about rich people losing their stuff. They can buy more. They have insurance policies.

To put this in perspective, here is a passage from an article in The New York Times today:

By late Tuesday, the fires had consumed well over 1,000 homes and commercial structures, with the authorities reporting that 68,500 homes remained threatened. At least 500,000 people were estimated to have evacuated and thousands more had been ordered to move, making the evacuation effort roughly half the size of that from the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina.

Sources list the number of deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina and the floods that followed at well over 1,800. It is now widely believed, and generally accepted, that many of those people died needlessly due to government ineptitude and indifference.

So far, the wildfires have claimed the lives of two people; twenty-five have reportedly been treated for burns. Two dead. Twenty-five burned. That’s less action than Boston-area hospitals saw after the Red Sox beat the Indians on Sunday.

But President Bush has been all over these fires. Part of me has to believe that he learned (suppress laughter) from, specifically, his mistakes in the Gulf Coast immediately before, during, and after Katrina and, more generally, his overall inability to handle any sort of crisis, whether it be domestic issues like the economy or foreign policy follies of his own making. But, like I said, that’s just a part of me. A small, naive part; perhaps the part held over from my teenage years. But I am more cynical now. And a larger, more intelligent part of me believes that this administration’s response to rich people losing their homes has more to do with President Bush appealing to his base and the fact that California is run by a Republican governor and who can kick his ass than it does with his ability to finally gauge appropriate responses to tragic circumstances. If these fires were ripping through Compton or Oakland, do you honestly believe that they’d been getting as much attention?

Of course, I’m not all that upset that Elmer J. Fudd and his team of wabbit hunters are finally doing something right. I’m upset that the media is putting this tragedy on par with Katrina, and 9/11, and the Iraq War, and Ellen’s dog. Not all tragedies are created equal.

Wealthy people built houses near the woods. In the desert. In a part of the country where forest fires spark every year. As a friend of mine said this morning, “I should get a refund on any insurance premium I paid that was used to support their construction.” Where is the national outcry for that cause? Maybe Charlie Gibson and the ABC News team can cover it when they get back from doing god’s work in SoCal.

To my surprise, I learned this morning that International Stuttering Awareness Day took place yesterday. How is it possible that I didn’t know about this, I don’t know, sometime before yesterday?

I think that if anyone should have known about this, it should have been me. But I didn’t hear a word about it on the news or read anything alerting me to this in the newspaper. I can’t really blame anyone for this. It isn’t particularly newsworthy. It just bugs me that this came and went without so much as a passing glance from me or, most probably, anyone I know.

For those who are unfamiliar with stuttering, here is some basic info from The Stuttering Foundation.

What is stuttering? Stuttering is a communication disorder in which the flow of speech is broken by repetitions (li-li-like this), prolongations (lllllike this), or abnormal stoppages (no sound) of sounds and syllables. There may also be unusual facial and body movements associated with the effort to speak.

What causes stuttering? There are four factors most likely to contribute to the development of stuttering: genetics ( approximately 60% of those who stutter have a family member who does also); child development (children with other speech and language problems or developmental delays are more likely to stutter); neurophysiology (recent research has shown that people who stutter process speech and language in different areas of the brain than those who do not stutter); and family dynamics ( high expectations and fast-paced lifestyles can contribute to stuttering).

It is probable that what causes stuttering differs from what makes it continue or get worse.

How many people stutter? Over three million Americans stutter or approximately 1 percent of the population.

What is the ratio of males to females who stutter? Stuttering affects four times as many males as females.

As most know, I am a stutterer. I use various control techniques to manipulate the fluency of my speech so that few people know I stutter at all. This was not the case when I was younger. Putting any sounds together was practically impossible. I received daily speech therapy for about nine years (kindergarten through eighth grade) and learned how to increase fluency and minimize most of the “bad habits” many stutterers develop (i.e. facial ticks, intense muscle contractions).

I’ve often said that, with the exception of my parents, the most important person in my life was, and continues to be, my speech therapist. When you stutter, you lose a lot of confidence. You feel stupid because a lot of people think the inability to speak is a sign of some mental deficiency. After a while, especially when you’re a kid, you start to believe it. But my speech therapist instilled a confidence in me that no one else was able to get through. She gave me a voice, and I honestly don’t know if I would be living a successful, happy life without the work she did with me.

I still deal with stuttering every day. It doesn’t just go away. It’s embarrassing to stutter. People laugh because they don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re having a little trouble getting your words started. When I have really bad fluency now, which happens less and less often, I can feel myself shrinking. I still dread the telephone and have to psyche myself up to make a call. I still find myself looking for things to eat on a restaurant menu that I know I can order without stuttering. I’m an educated, 24-years-old adult and I don’t eat what I want. I eat what I can order. This is ridiculous, but sometimes I can’t help it. It’s easier to just order the food and eat it than it is to deal with the negative feelings that come about when I stutter.

For some strange reason, too, saying my own name is pretty difficult. I’ve read this about a lot of people who stutter. This is more annoying than anything else. It’s probably the one word I’ve said the most in my life. Someone asks you your name, you should be able to answer pretty quickly. But it takes a split second longer to compose myself, take a breath, and let the word out. It’s a pain in the ass, especially because people don’t really know about stuttering.

That’s why something like International Stuttering Awareness Day is so important. It allows people to familiarize themselves with something they might not know existed otherwise. I’m kind of pissed I didn’t know about it beforehand, though. I would have liked to do something to participate.